As the number of applications and services provided over the Internet continues to increase, the amount of electronic content, applications and services used by individuals, enterprises, and the like also continues to rise significantly. As a result, these entities are turning to cloud computing to manage this content and data storage. In general, cloud computing, also known as on-demand computing, is a kind of Internet-based computing in which shared resources and information is provided to computers and other devices on-demand. Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, on-demand access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources, where the hardware and/or software used to support the data services is dynamically scalable to meet the needs of the services at any given time.
Cloud computing and storage solutions provide users and enterprises with various capabilities to store and process their data content in third-party data centers. Cloud computing relies on sharing of resources to achieve coherence and economies of scale. A user, enterprise or other customer will typically rent, lease, or otherwise pay for access to resources through the cloud, such that the entity does not have to purchase and maintain the hardware and/or software to provide access to these resources.
Accordingly, the development of cloud computing and the ability to purchase both services and capacity from multiple cloud providers has provided a useful secondary storage system that can be utilized by users and enterprises to store and manage data content. However, because the costs of data storage is directly proportional to the amount of data being stored, there remains a need to provide a more efficient and space-saving technique for storing data content and managing the physical size of such data content, especially with remote data storage services, such as these cloud computing services.